Low-resolution screen for its size. Not water resistant. Modem doesn't have the latest features.

Bottom Line

The OnePlus 5T is the best midrange phone out there, but it's too expensive to be an American midrange phone. This creates a quandary in the US market.

The OnePlus 5T ($499 for 64GB; $559 for 128GB) is the best phone you can get for $500, but that's slicing the phone market pretty thinly. The latest from the cult unlocked smartphone maker is beautifully built and has the processor power and RAM of phones that cost $300 more. But its modem and main camera are thoroughly midrange, landing it in an awkward zone between less-expensive and more-capable devices on the US market.

To properly understand the OnePlus 5T, you have to shake off its old "flagship killer" reputation. The 5T doesn't measure up to actual 2017 flagships like the Samsung Galaxy S8, Samsung Galaxy Note 8, or the iPhone X. Rather, this is a midrange-killer, assassinating devices like the Moto X4, the LG G6, the Essential PH-1, and the HTC U11 Life.

The 5T comes hot on the heels of the OnePlus 5, in OnePlus's second year of a six-month cadence. (Last year, we saw the 3 and the 3T; there was no OnePlus 4.) It shares a processor and modem with the 5, but the screen is upgraded and the camera is changed.

From Apple, you'd consider that an "S" release. OnePlus founder Pete Lau joked that S, plus one, is T, and so here we are. Don't assume that OnePlus will have a new phone every six months, he cautioned us. This one just has a screen that he couldn't pass up.

Physical Design

The OnePlus 5T is very well built. It has a very slim, matte black aluminum unibody, at 6.15 by 2.95 by 0.29 inches (HWD) and 5.7 ounces. It isn't slippery, but you'll still want to put a case on it. The single speaker is on the bottom, along with the USB-C port and standard headphone jack. On the left side, you'll find OnePlus's excellent physical mute slider. The front of the phone is mostly screen.

The screen is why the OnePlus 5T exists. According to OnePlus execs, they saw the trend towards bigger screens and smaller bezels, so when a 6-inch, 18:9 Samsung AMOLED panel became available, they jumped at the chance to grab it. The 2160-by-1080 panel is 401ppi, which is less dense than other competing phones. They tend to be either higher-resolution, at the same size, or smaller in size, at the same resolution. The result is that icons and UX elements appear physically larger here than on a Galaxy S8 or Moto X4, although you get about the same Web browsing real estate as on the S8, because the physical size of text is the same. The one place you lose is in VR, where the OnePlus 5T isn't compatible with VR headsets, but OnePlus makes the correct point that VR isn't that frequently used nowadays.

The phone has the brightness, rich colors and wide viewing angles we associate with Samsung AMOLED, as opposed to the lower-quality LG P-OLED we've seen on the Google Pixel 2 XL. If that's too saturated for you, though, you can tune it down to DCI-P3 (like the iPhone) or sRGB (like the Pixel.) Screen images are perfectly viewable outdoors.

The phone's fingerprint scanner is on the back now, like on LG phones. It's quick and works reliably. That's good, because the phone's face-unlock feature does not work reliably. OnePlus says that it created a proprietary, 2D face-unlock system that is faster and more secure than Google's default face unlock. I found that it didn't work very well off-angle (on a table), or with my eyes closed, or when I was backlit, or sometimes just in general. Most of the time it worked, but it didn't work enough that (unlike with Apple's Face ID) it got on my nerves. Having the fingerprint scanner as a reliable backup was essential.

Left: OnePlus 5. Right: OnePlus 5T.

Cases are important for phones. Many smaller Android brands, such as ZTE, don't have a broad set of reliable cases. That's a OnePlus strength: the company offers $19.95 screen protectors and $19.95-$29.95 cases in various styles, including silicone, carbon-fiber, and natural woods.

Unfortunately, the OnePlus 5T is not IP-rated for water resistance. I got very mixed messages on water resistance from OnePlus; I was told that it could be dropped in puddles or handled in the rain, but not dunked. We did not test water resistance because we needed the phone to remain functioning.

Modem and Audio Quality

OnePlus, unfortunately, cut some corners with the cellular modem. The 5T supports all of AT&T's and T-Mobile's frequency bands except T-Mobile's new rural Band 71. It also supports some Sprint and Verizon LTE bands (including Sprint's band 41, but not Verizon's band 13), but those carriers won't authenticate this phone.

The phone supports 3x carrier aggregation but lacks 4x4 MIMO antennas, so it tops out at 600Mbps down. That's similar to the latest iPhones and most midrange phones, but outpaced by higher-end Android phones.

The phone takes up to two nano-SIMs, but I was disappointed to see that the second slot couldn't be used for a MicroSD card. Dual SIM phones are rare here in the states, but additional storage would have been welcome.

Call quality is good here, but voice coverage will depend on your carrier. The phone supports both Wi-Fi and VoLTE on T-Mobile. Neither option appeared with AT&T or Cricket SIMs. Using the AT&T 3G network, the earpiece was loud, and the speakerphone was sharp and clear. The speakerphone mix doesn't kill all the background noise, but my voice was nicely detected and pushed far forward of any background noise.

The 5T supports Bluetooth 5.0 and had no trouble pairing with my Plantronics Voyager Focus UC. If you play high-quality music files, though, make sure to delve into the settings and switch the codec from SBC to the higher-quality AptX HD. The single speaker isn't amazing, but at least it doesn't distort at high volumes the way the Moto X4's does.

Battery life was very good, at 7 hours, 10 minutes of LTE video streaming with the screen on full brightness. Unfortunately, that's two hours less than the OnePlus 5's runtime (9 hours, 15 minutes), likely due to the increased screen size. It'll still last longer than the S8 though (5 hours, 45 minutes). OnePlus's quick "Dash Charging" lives up to its billing, too. I got from 0 to 40% in 20 minutes, and to 79% in 45 minutes, with the phone off. If you have other phones around, be aware that OnePlus's dash charger, included with the phone, is just an ordinary non-quick charger when used with other phones, and non-OnePlus chargers won't quick-charge the phone.

The phone also doesn't have wireless charging, but honestly, after six months of using a Galaxy S8 with wireless charging, I still see it as a disposable frill. I'm okay with leaving it out on this midrange phone.

Oxygen OS and Performance

OnePlus's Oxygen OS skin over Android 7.1.1 Nougat focuses on speed and customizability. (The company says that an Android Oreo update will come during the first quarter of 2018.) Its benchmarks tend to match other Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 phones, especially if they're in 1080P resolution mode: its 169,703 score on Antutu, for instance, it very similar to the Moto Z2 Force and the Google Pixel 2, and just a bit behind the Galaxy Note 8 and LG V30.

On-screen gaming frame rates are also on par with high-end peers at the same resolution. The Galaxy Note 8 only scores 13 fps in the GFXBench Car Crash test, compared to the OnePlus's 23 fps, but knock the Note 8 down to 1080p and it's on par.

The thing is, though, this is the least expensive Snapdragon 835 phone out there. At its price level, the OnePlus 5T is competing with the Moto X4 and HTC U11 Life, both of which manage around 70,000 on Antutu, and the LG G6, which gets 135,000. The OnePlus 5T's GPU has at least double the performance of any of those phones, which you definitely feel in action and driving games; the game Breakneck, for instance, had more sensitive controls on the OnePlus 5T than on the Moto X4. So you're getting a heck of a lot of processor for your money.

The same goes for RAM. The 5T comes in two models, with 6GB and 8GB of RAM, and 64GB or 128GB of storage. That means more flipping in and out of apps without watching them restart than on other phones, which is especially relevant if you do a lot of gaming. Our 128GB test phone has 111GB free.

Oxygen OS, itself, doesn't get in your way. It looks and feels like stock Android, with a bunch of little customizations that you can use or ignore. The most useful is "parallel apps," which lets you create a second, virtual installation of some popular apps so you can have two accounts available. It works with Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook Messenger, Twitter, Skype, and Whatsapp.

OnePlus has a vibrant user community, a vigorous beta program, and an invasive data collection system telling the company what people are doing with their phones. After some controversy, the "user experience program" is still opt-in, although you can opt out in the Settings menu.

And if you don't like Oxygen OS at all, OnePlus is probably the most hacker-friendly mainstream Android brand; the company confirmed that the phone's bootloader is unlocked, and you can install whatever ROM you like.

Cameras

OnePlus does some odd things with the cameras this time around. On the back of the phone, there's a main 16-megapixel, f/1.7 camera but also a 20-megapixel, f/1.7 camera that's supposed to be for low light. The front camera is an excellent 16-megapixel, f/2 selfie shooter.

The philosophy around the camera is a little perplexing. The secondary camera is supposed to kick in for scenes below 10 lux, using 4:1 pixel binning to provide a brighter, 5-megapixel image. That's totally not what it does in practice.

First of all, 10 lux is really dim. Indoor scenes are far more than 10 lux; even a darkened bowling alley, where we tested the camera, was at about 30 lux. So it can be hard to get the secondary camera to trigger in the first place, especially because you can't turn it on manually.

The secondary camera also delivers 20MP files. OnePlus says it bins the image down to 5MP and then re-expands the file to 20MP, which introduces a lot of visible artifacting. And because of software which prioritizes higher shutter speeds over viewable images, the photos can still look very dim, especially compared to the latest Galaxies or the Pixel 2.

Here's where "what you're comparing it with" matters a lot. Against the $649 Pixel 2 and $720 Galaxy S8 the 5T has unimpressive low light performance. But the 5T crushes the $400 Moto X4 in low light. In our super-low-light test, we could make out details in the 5T's image that were swallowed up in dimness on the X4.

In good light, the main camera also falls between the Moto X4 and the Galaxy S8/Note 8. Yes, there are more pixels than on the 12-megapixel Samsung phones, but that didn't result in more sharpness and detail, just more artifacting. The software bias towards higher shutter speeds didn't necessarily help here either, as some outdoor HDR photos turned out a little darker than I'd like.

The 16-megapixel, f/2.0 front camera destroys the X4's front shooter. It delivers richer color, more realistic detail, and collects considerably more light. It takes flashless, low-light shots in darkened rooms that just get swallowed up in mud on the X4.

The dual cameras enable the usual gimmicky bokeh 'portrait mode' in its most basic form, without the after-the-fact focus editing of the Galaxy Note 8 or the iPhone's range of lighting effects. Using the second camera slot for the 'low light' camera also means you don't get wide-angle (like on the X4 and LG G6) or 2x zoom (like on the Note 8 and iPhone) options. There's a confusing '2X' button in the camera UI, but it just activates digital zoom, with all the usual digital zoom artifacting.

OnePlus's "electronic image stabilization" stays with the theme of "not as good as a flagship, but better than nothing." When recording 4K video, you can see the EIS smoothing out video through a slight pulsing as it constantly corrects the video. It's nowhere near as smooth, calm or fluid as the OIS on a Galaxy Note 8, but it's less jittery than no stabilization at all.

None of this should be too shocking; it's just reality. There are no shortcuts. The OnePlus 5T has the best camera you can get in a $500 phone, but it doesn't measure up to phones that cost more.

Comparisons and Conclusions

There's an 'uncanny valley' in phone pricing in the US. We buy a lot of phones that cost less than $400, but if we're going to spend $500, pretty often we spend $700, especially if that $700 phone comes with a monthly payment plan.

The OnePlus 5T falls smack into that uncanny valley. If you're looking for a big screen at a reasonable price, there's nothing quite like it. But OnePlus's price creep has made its phones steadily less attractive compared with higher-end competitors. The OnePlus One cost $299. The OnePlus 3 cost $399; the OnePlus 5 cost $479, and now we're up to $499 and $559.

The $649 Google Pixel 2 and the $720 Samsung Galaxy S8 both have better cameras and modems (although they offer less storage and RAM), and they support all four major US carriers. If you intend to spend more than the $400 for a Moto X4, you're likely to be picking up one of those on a monthly payment plan from a carrier or major retailer. There's no payment plan for the OnePlus 5T; you have to buy it up front.

The 5T sets the bar for a $500 phone, to be sure. There's no $500 phone that performs like this. But not many Americans are looking for a $500 phone, per se. Unless the screen size here calls out to you, the superior camera and network performance on the Pixel 2 or Galaxy S8 will probably do you better.

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About the Author

PCMag.com's lead mobile analyst, Sascha Segan, has reviewed hundreds of smartphones, tablets and other gadgets in more than 13 years with PCMag. He's the head of our Fastest Mobile Networks project, hosts our One Cool Thing daily Web show, and writes opinions on tech and society.
Segan is also a multiple award-winning travel writer. Other than ... See Full Bio

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